There is an increasing need to automatically monitor a mobile device user's location and other behavior, understand the user's habits and interests, and provide intelligent personal assistance to the user based on the user's habits and interests obtained through location based behavior analysis. Presently, location based services include manual check-ins. For a manual check-in, the user opens an application on their mobile device manually, and indicates that they are at a specific business.
In the area of location-based services, a check-in represents a single visit by a user to a location or place on the earth. One of the main problems with checking in is check-in fatigue. The fact that most popular social networks require users to manually enter their location makes them pretty tedious considering there is often little to no reward. FourSquare®, Facebook® or Google Latitude® have developed check-in technology based on geo-fencing and background location monitoring that can trigger some interesting applications by getting close. However, this type of solution is not generative, which require users to input his favorite places into the system in advance. It cannot be applied to a new place that is not in the scope of existing places database of the user.
Additionally, location-based searches are manual. That is, the user conducts a search of some business using keyword, such as “restaurant”, and the application returns results that are the closest to the user's current location.
Other location-based service includes mobile social applications wherein, for example, friends are shown on a map. However, that services and applications are limited because they can't accurately determine the point of the interest the user is at, hard to disambiguate between multiple points of interest near each other. Generally, current local business or POI search is only using the spatial data as input, which does not generally provide enough information to accurately determine the point of interest.
There is an increasing need to automatically monitor a user's location and notify relevant people of the user's location. For example, family members may want to monitor each other's location and automatically receive notifications when they arrive at or depart from a place (location) for peace of mind. Parents may want to get notifications when their kids arrive at dangerous, inappropriate, or unusual place. Students in a class may want to share the location where they are automatically so that they can locate each other in an easy way for studying or playing together. Employees in a company may want to see colleagues' locations to schedule communication more efficiently.
It is desirable to have a method, apparatus and system for persistently determining and sharing user stays of a user of a mobile device.